Stilgoe,

J (2018) Geoengineering, in Castree, Hulme and

Proctor (Eds) (2018) Companion to Environmental Studies,
Routledge

Abstract
Geoengineering means deliberately manipulating the earth’s climate in order to
counteract climate change. It is little more than a set of ideas. There is little in the
way of technological development. However, proposals such as the spreading of
sulphate particles in the stratosphere are now starting to be taken seriously by
climate scientists. Geoengineering would mean humanity taking responsibility
for planetary climate control. It raises huge questions that relate to technological
feasibility and unintended climatic consequences, as well as the ethics and
politics of pursuing a technological fix for climate change.

Introduction
Responses to the global problem of climate change have conventionally been
separated into mitigation and adaptation. As concerted global action on climate
has stalled, national science advisers and others have augmented this to press
their case. John Holdren in 2010 told a climate change conference that “We only
have three options… It’s really that simple: mitigation, adaptation, and
suffering.”1

However, in the darker corners of the climate debate, another, more radical
option has sometimes been discussed: geoengineering (or ‘climate engineering’).
The idea of intentional technological interference in the climate system in order
cool the planet has a long history, but has only recently emerged to become a
topic of mainstream scientific discussion.

History: Rethinking the unthinkable

Geoengineering is often discussed as an ‘emerging technology’. But it is not a
technology at all. It is not even a basket of technologies, or potential
technologies, although some of the technical possibilities suggested for
geoengineering are better developed than others. Geoengineering is an idea, and
it is a deeply problematic one. In 2010, science writer Eli Kintisch announced
that it was ‘a bad idea whose time has come’.2

As an idea, geoengineering has a history as long as that of modern science.
Francis Bacon, in his imaginary constitution of Salomon’s House’, saw the control

1 Text of remarks by Obama science adviser John Holdren to the National Climate

Adaptation Summit, May 27, 2010

2 Kintisch, E. (2010). Hack the planet: science's best hope-or worst nightmare-for

averting climate catastrophe. John Wiley & Sons.p. 13

of weather being an important part of the project of organised natural
philosophy.3 Three centuries later, JD Bernal claimed that,

“By an intelligent diversion of warm ocean-currents together with some
means of colouring snow so that the sun could melt it, it might be possible
to keep the Arctic ice-free for one summer, and that one year might tip the
balance and permanently change the climate of the northern
hemisphere.”4

Such speculations would continue throughout the twentieth century. At the same
time, as described exhaustively by James Fleming, enthusiasts and engineers of
varying credibility promised control of the weather to desperate farmers and
others who had fallen victim to climatic whims.5 The story of these rainmakers
moved slowly from mythology to respectable science during the twentieth
century. As the growth of computing power and global climate models promised
greater predictive power over the weather and potent, world-changing
technologies emerged during the two World Wars and the Cold War, some
techno-optimists began to construct more detailed schemes. John Von Neumann
wanted to take ‘the first steps toward influencing the weather by rational, human
intervention’.6 As described by Kristine Harper, visions of control lay behind the
rapid growth of meteorology as a science, although in public most scientists
would emphasise that their aims were merely predictive.

Some of the earliest thinking on what came to be known as stratospheric particle
injection came from Mikhail Budyko, a Russian who was one of the leading
figures in the quantification of meteorology, previously been ridiculed as a
‘guessing science’.7 In the 1970s, Budyko sketched a plan for increasing the
reflectivity of the planet’s upper atmosphere using sulphate particles, dispensed
from aeroplanes.8 It was this idea that, having lain all-but dormant for 40 years,
inspired the intervention of Paul Crutzen in 2006. Crutzen, a highly respected
Nobel Laureate for his work on atmospheric ozone, argued that the problem of
climate change was an intractable Gordian knot. Geoengineering with a
stratospheric sunshade provided a sword, or, as he put it, ‘a contribution to
resolve a policy dilemma’ (Crutzen, 2006).

3 Horton, Z. (2014) Collapsing Scale: Nanotechnology and Geoengineering as

Speculative Media, in press

4 Bernal, J. D. (1939). The Social Function of Science, Faber 2010 edition, pp. 379-

380
5 Fleming, J. (2010). Fixing the Sky: The Checkered History of Weather and

Climate Control, Columbia University Press. New York

6 Von Neumann, quoted in Harper, K. (2008). Weather by the numbers: The

genesis of modern meteorology, MIT Press.

7 Harper, K. (2006). Meteorology's Struggle for Professional Recognition in the

USA (1900–1950). Annals of science, 63(02), 179-199.

8 Budyko, M. I. 1974, Izmeniya Klimata. Gidrometeoizdat, later published as:

Budyko, M. I. 1977 Climatic changes (transl. Izmeniia Klimata Leningrad:

Gidrometeoizdat, 1974). Washington, DC: American Geophysical
UnionBuchanan, R. A. (2006).

Crutzen’s paper brought a veneer of respectability to what had previously been
considered a Cold War joke. He argued that the technologies with which to
geoengineer were cheap and readily available. Even scientists who hated the
idea could not ignore the possibility that it might be put into action at some
point.

Assessing geoengineering options

Oliver Morton begins his analysis of geoengineering by asking two questions,
originally from Robert Socolow:

1. Do you believe the risks of climate change merit serious action aimed at
lessening them?
2. Do you think that reducing an industrial economy’s carbon dioxide
emissions to near zero is very hard?9

If we answer yes to both, Morton argues, we should take geoengineering
seriously. As 21st Century climate scientists around the world detected
inadequate policy responses to the problem they had elucidated, they reluctantly
began to agree.

For many of these scientists, geoengineering aroused particular concerns.
International negotiations on climate change mitigation were fragile and
geoengineering seemed to present a ‘moral hazard’: if insurance against the risks
of climate change were on offer, people in power would surely become less
interested in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Scientists were not only
concerned that geoengineering would be seen as a ‘get out of jail free’ card, they
also worried that its deployment would have unintended consequences on global
weather. In 2008, Alan Robock offered what he called a ‘fairly comprehensive list
of reasons why geoengineering might be a bad idea’. The list was wide-ranging,
encompassing politics, ethics and risks to local weather. Robock concludes that,
in addition, ‘there is reason to worry about what we don’t know’.10 Robock was
one of the first wave of natural scientists to seriously explore geoengineering.

The move towards the scientific mainstream, coupled with growing attention
from right-wing pundits in the USA who were eager for hassle-free solutions to
the question of climate change, prompted the Royal (see diagram), the UK’s
national academy of sciences, to take on geoengineering in 2008. Their
assessment, which aimed to bring a cool scientific rationality to what had
become a heated discussion, set the tone for much subsequent discussion.11

9 Morton, O, 2015, The Planet Remade, Princeton University Press, p. 1
10 Robock, A., (2008). 20 reasons why geoengineering may be a bad idea.

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 64, No. 2, 14-18, 59., p. 17.

11 Royal Society, 2009, Geoengineering the Climate: Science, governance and

uncertainty, London, Royal Society. (It is worth noting that this study was not the
first assessment of geoengineering by a national academy. The US national


(Copyright Royal Society. Used with permission)


The Royal Society divided Geoengineering options into two proposed
mechanisms of intervention. The first, carbon dioxide removal, involves the
reduction of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere with machines or
by enhancing natural systems. The second, solar radiation management, bounces
a proportion of sunlight back into space by making the Earth’s surface, clouds or
upper atmosphere more reflective.

The Society assessed the various options on multiple criteria, including
effectiveness, speed, cost, safety, and concluded, as Paul Crutzen had done, that
stratospheric particle injection was the most potent, the cheapest, but also the
riskiest option available. The report concluded “all of the geoengineering
methods assessed have major uncertainties in their likely costs, effectiveness or
associated risks and are unlikely to be ready for deployment in the short to
medium term”12. Nevertheless, scientific interest in stratospheric particle
injection continued to grow, 13 in part because of an assumption that it would be,
in David Keith’s words, ‘cheap and technically easy’.14 Economist William

academies addressed the issue, albeit in politically unsophisticated terms, in
1992 as part of an assessment of options for tackling climate change (NAS
(1992) Policy Implications of Greenhouse Warming. National Academy Press,
Washington).)
12 Geoengineering the Climate: Science, Governance and Uncertainty (London:

The Royal Society, September 2009), p. 57,

13 Oldham, P., Szerszynski, B., Stilgoe, J., Brown, C., Eacott, B., & Yuille, A. (2015).

Mapping the landscape of climate engineering. Philosophical Transactions of the

Royal Society of London A, 372(2031), 1-20.
14 Keith, D. (2013). A case for climate engineering. MIT Press, p. ix
Nordhaus was among the first to argue that, compared with decarbonisation of
industrial society, geoengineering offered the potential for ‘costless mitigation of
climate change’.15 This economic enthusiasm was then, without much critical
analysis, popularised in the book Superfreakonomics.16 The history of similar
sociotechnical systems suggests that the complexities and uncertainties
associated such cost estimates are vast.

In 2015, the US National Academies revisited geoengineering, renaming it
‘climate intervention’ because of the committee’s opinion that the previous label
“implies a greater level of precision and control than might be possible” (ibid., p.
x). The US assessment echoed much of the Royal Society’s and further elucidated
the problem identified by the UK body, which is that the cheapest most potent
proposals for geoengineering were also those that were most ethically
problematic and hardest to govern. It is notable that both the UK and US
assessments have included ethical and political concerns alongside more
conventional technical ones.

For some (including an early reviewer of the Royal Society’s report) the
profundity of ethical and safety concerns raised by stratospheric particle
injection warranted ruling it our altogether. Mike Hulme has argued that it
represents ‘an illusory solution to the wrong problem’ and should therefore be
taken off the table altogether.17 Whether in spite of or because of its Promethean
connotations, stratospheric geoengineering continues to dominate
geoengineering discussions.

Conclusion
The debate about geoengineering has tended to make technologies and ideas
appear closer and more real than they in fact are. For any geoengineering
technology to make a substantial difference to climate change, it would demand a
dramatic reconfiguration of research, technology, society and politics. The
debate about geoengineering currently out of all proportion to the scale of actual
research into it. Where research has been funded, it has tended to involve
frictionless simulations in computer climate models and speculative social
science and ethics. As of 2016, there is very little engineering in
geoengineering.18 There is still, therefore, an important discussion to be had
about we – as society and as scientific researchers – should proceed: Should
outdoor experiments begin? Should patents on geoengineering technologies be

15 Nordhaus, W. D. (1992). An Optimal Transition Path for Controlling

Greenhouse Gases. Science, 258, 1315-19.p.1317.

16 Levitt, S. D., & Dubner, S. J. (2010). Superfreakonomics: Global cooling,

patriotic prostitutes and why suicide bombers should buy life insurance. Penguin
UK.
17 Hulme, M. (2014). Can Science Fix Climate Change: A Case Against Climate

Engineering. John Wiley & Sons., p. 130

18 Oldham, P., Szerszynski, B., Stilgoe, J., Brown, C., Eacott, B., & Yuille, A. (2015).

Mapping the landscape of climate engineering. Philosophical Transactions of the

Royal Society of London A, 372(2031), 1-20.
allowed? Can geoengineering only be legitimately governed at the level of the
United Nations? As with any set of complex technologies, any hard predictions
are doomed to fail. Geoengineering, perhaps in another guise or with more
modest ambitions, may come to be an important part of the response to climate
change, or it may eventually be regarded as nothing more than wild speculation.
Watch this space.

Learning resources

Books
o Hulme, M. (2014). Can science fix climate change: A case against climate
engineering. John Wiley & Sons.
o Keith, D. (2013). A case for climate engineering. MIT Press.
o Morton, O. (2015). The Planet Remade: How geoengineering could change
the world. Princeton University Press.
o Stilgoe, J. (2015). Experiment earth: Responsible innovation in
geoengineering. Routledge.

Audio
o Science for the people, interview with Oliver Morton about The Planet
Remade http://www.scienceforthepeople.ca/episodes/the-planet-
remade

Video
o David Keith’s TED talk, A critical look at geoengineering against climate
change
https://www.ted.com/talks/david_keith_s_surprising_ideas_on_climate_c
hange?language=en
o Experiment Earth - Responsible innovation and geoengineering
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sekLudN3OkA